At the Mission

SOMETIMES YOU WAKE UP to find yourself in a new place, with new people, and starting a new life without knowing how any of it happened. The only explanation you can offer is that it’s the will of God—destiny. Both of them—the will of God and destiny—are forces nobody’s ever been able to understand completely. We don’t know how they operate, so all we can do is accept our lot, since we have no other choice.

In my case, I found myself under the care of nuns at the Josephite Mission in the Fuwayhat neighborhood of Benghazi. They took care of me until I was good as new. One day when I was lying in bed, one of the senior nuns came and sat down beside me. She started talking to me about things relating to my stay in the mission clinic and how I found the place. Then she asked me if I knew how to read and write, and if I’d been to school.

At first I didn’t understand what she was talking about, and she had to explain what she meant. I told her I didn’t even know what a school was. Aunt Sabriya had told me she was saving up to send me to the literacy school run by Bint Flayfila. She said that if I got an education, I could have a better future than if I just stayed all my life in the Slave Yards.¹

She kept talking to me about the idea, especially when we’d go into the city to serve some family having a wedding celebration. She told me that this job of mine was only temporary, and that she was looking for permanent work in somebody’s home so that she could send me to the girls’ school and pay my tuition.

The person who arranged for me to go on being taken care by the nuns after I got out of the clinic was Yousef. In those days this sort of thing was easy to arrange. The mission took in lots of orphans, both black and white. The nuns taught them reading, writing, and proper etiquette. They erased some things and put other, more refined and civilized things, in their place. The children really took to what they learned at the mission, so that there was an obvious difference between somebody who’d been brought up by the nuns, and somebody who’d grown up in a poor home with lots of brothers and sisters, and in an environment that lacked pretty much everything. Children in the latter category didn’t learn anything other than how to beg, work in the markets, or be domestic servants. If they were distant relatives of the mayor, they’d wait till they were given jobs as street sweepers. The city was so full of them that if you swept the streets in the daytime, some relative of yours was probably sweeping them at night!

At the mission I learned to read and write Italian. I learned other things too, like knitting, and I discovered that there are things in the world that can make life happy and fun. I learned that by mastering a skill, people could escape the life of abject poverty in the Slave Yards. When the girls at the mission reached puberty, they were trained to be seamstresses, nurses, or teachers. Since I had a knack for making people feel better, I joined the nurses. I enjoyed this kind of work, especially with little children.

After Aunt Sabriya died, I was given new mothers that I loved and learned from and got attached to.

The love I received from Yousef Giuseppe was the most wonderful thing I could have imagined. When he came into my life, I started moving away from the world of the Yards and into a different sort of world. My new world was broader than the one I’d known before. It was based on human connections—not on race, or color, or whether you were somebody’s relative. I can’t belong to a society where everything’s dictated by blood relations. I have a mind and a heart, which is all you need to be a member of the human family.

The people closest to me in this world were Miftah, Yousef, Aunt Aida, Jaballah, and Durma, who came to see me whenever they could. Aunt Aida would check on me and give me advice just the way Aunt Sabriya used to do, while Durma would come to lighten my load with a different way of looking at things. Miftah’s smile, his sympathy, and his caring broke through the cloud of sorrow and loneliness that hung over me. As for Yousef, words fail to describe his mysterious presence, which turned later into a total partnership of body and spirit.

My special bond with Yousef, who was quite a bit older than I was, started developing when we would sit on the grounds of the clinic together. He showed interest in the things I was learning, and he encouraged me to read and write. Yousef was in a class of his own. Other men of his generation considered it improper to have women around them in their daily lives, and most girls my age were housebound. But Yousef insisted that I go out, get an education, and work. Every time he came to visit, he’d bring a newspaper or a book, and on Saturdays and Sundays he’d sit beside me and have me read to him.

Little by little, I opened up to the man in him. I felt him close to my heart, and his image would stay with me after he’d left. His spirit would surround me during the day and visit me at night. When the nuns locked the doors at night and I went to sleep by myself on my side of the mission, I didn’t feel alone.

Little by little, I started missing him whenever he was gone. I would write him letters and wait for the mailman to come to the mission, either to collect what I’d written to him or deliver what he’d written to me. Then, when it came time to see him off, I cried my heart out. He was leaving to go study in Italy with a recommendation from the church, and there was a possibility that he’d stay there permanently.

Years went by. Miftah would come see me when he didn’t have work, and his visits always lifted my spirits. I would run to meet him with open arms whenever they told me he’d come. He’d been settled for years in a single job, which he loved so much, it seemed he’d been made for it. His new mother had helped him get the job with a relative of hers who ran a bakery that specialized in a kind of fried bread we called sifiniz. Miftah was honest, clean, conscientious, and helpful, and the shop owner thought so highly of him that he put him in charge of making the sifiniz. When he came to visit, he would bring some for me and the nuns, and tell the sisters to take good care of me.

He used to tease me and call me “Little Blackie.” So I started calling him “the sifiniz man.”

“Good going, brother!” I told him. “In just a few years you went from being flour to being a nice brown pancake!”²

I started working full-time at the mission clinic, where I did the same jobs as the nuns. I lived a public sort of life, which left no room for anything private apart from my occasional exchanges of letters with Yousef and chats about the future with Miftah.

Then one day the mailman brought a special letter from Giuseppe—the name Yousef had taken on in Italy. He told me he was coming home to Benghazi. In a PS he wrote, “Benghazi means Atiga.” I could hardly wait to see him, and I was counting the minutes and the seconds till he got home. I talked with the nuns about his homecoming and how I wanted to plan a little party for him. When Miftah noticed how excited I was about Yousef’s return, he made a pastry especially for the occasion and called it “Little Blackie and the Slave”! It was a kind of raisin cake topped with roasted nuts and honey.

Yousef came back more grown-up, citified, and educated than before. I could see that he’d changed, and he could see that I had too. The thirteen-year-old girl with tight braids and white ribbons in her hair was now a woman.

In the days that followed we met regularly outside the mission. One day we’d been studying together, when suddenly the topic of conversation shifted, and he kissed me. This was followed by a dreamy night like none I’d ever experienced before. Early the next morning he came to my quarters, and I realized he was going to tell me he loved me. The sisters had noticed the succession of changes in our relationship, and Sister Maria said, “The fact that he rushed out here on a cold winter morning like this must mean he’s going to propose!”

And in fact, he asked for my hand, in spite of the age difference between us.

He didn’t go on for a long time about it. He just said he wanted us to get married, and then talk about everything. He said he didn’t have any set vision of our life together, but that we could imagine everything and work to achieve it.

We laughed later about the way he’d proposed, and when we saw how fast our first child came.

He used to say that if he’d gone on dragging his feet, our baby would never have been born. If, on the other hand, he’d lost his head, or if, after going along with his amorous expressions up to a point, I hadn’t disappeared for a day at a time out of embarrassment, especially with him being a grown man and me just a girl still, he might have been born before his time!

Little Muhammad’s birth was the start of another life for me. He gave new meaning to my existence.

1. A reference to the encampments outside Benghazi where, during the historical period in which this story’s events took place, most of Libya’s slaves and former slaves lived out their primitive existence.

2. Miftah’s last name, Daqiq, means “flour” in Arabic.